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SEMPITE Research · Measurement Study · September 2026
72% of Shopify Stores Have No Wishlist. A Third of the Rest Can’t Tell You Anything Came Back.
We sampled 30,000 domains, found 1,075 Shopify storefronts and measured 1,028 of them. Then we went back and checked every wishlist we thought we had found, because installing a wishlist and offering one turn out to be different things.
What 1,028 storefronts actually offer
46.0% of stores carry wishlist code somewhere in the page. That is the number a simple scan returns, and it is misleading. When we re-fetched every one of those 473 stores and looked at what the markup actually does, the picture separated into four groups.
So between 28.1% and 42.9% of stores offer a wishlist, depending on how you treat the cases static HTML cannot resolve. We report both rather than pick the flattering one. First-pass detector precision measured 95.4% (95% CI 93.1 to 97.0).
Twelve stores paid for a wishlist app, installed it, and turned it off. Their markup still ships the configuration with is_service_active: false. Any study counting installations rather than availability would have scored all twelve as having a wishlist.
The list is not the feature. The trigger is.
A saved item is the clearest purchase-intent signal a shopper ever volunteers. It is worth something only if the merchant can act on it later, which means a back-in-stock alert, a price-drop alert, or a low-stock nudge.
34.9% of stores with a working wishlist run no notify or back-in-stock app at all (95% CI 29.7 to 40.6). A shopper saves a sold-out item, the item returns, and nothing happens. The store collected the intent and built no way to answer it.
A further 19.4% require an account before a shopper can save anything. For a wholesale flow that is reasonable. For retail it is expensive, because shoppers who cannot save cheaply put the item in the cart instead and leave it there, which quietly corrupts cart-abandonment reporting and every automation built on top of it.
Stores that tag well are twice as likely to let you save
Split the sample into quartiles by how many tags each store puts on a product, then look at confirmed wishlist presence in each.
Top quartile is 2.26 times the bottom. Cochran-Armitage test for trend: z = 5.43, p = 5.6×10-8. This is not a story about tags causing wishlists. Both are what it looks like when somebody has actually thought about how the catalogue is found and kept.
What people are running
Of working wishlists, 63.7% come from a third-party app and 36.3% are built into the theme. App share in this sample:
The custom builds are worth noting. A theme-level wishlist that stores saves against the customer record, rather than in the browser, turns the list into queryable demand data: which variants are being saved, how fast, and what never converts. Most app installs keep saves in the shopper’s browser, where nobody can learn anything from them.
Frequently asked questions
What share of online stores have a wishlist?
Across 1,028 Shopify storefronts measured in September 2026, 46.0% carried wishlist code, but only 28.1% (95% CI 25.5 to 30.9) had a save control that could be confirmed in the served HTML. A further 11.4% carry wishlist code whose control is injected client-side and cannot be confirmed either way, which puts the true figure between 28.1% and 42.9%.
Do wishlists actually increase sales?
Only if something fires against them. A saved item is a declared intent signal, and the value is realised by the trigger, not the list. In this sample 34.9% of stores with a working wishlist ran no back-in-stock or notify app at all, so a shopper who saved a sold-out item would never hear that it returned.
Should a wishlist require customers to create an account?
19.4% of stores with a working wishlist require a login before a shopper can save anything. That is a defensible choice for a wholesale account flow and an expensive one for retail: usability research consistently finds shoppers who cannot save cheaply use the cart as a wishlist instead, which corrupts cart-abandonment metrics and every flow built on them.
Which wishlist apps do Shopify stores actually use?
Among stores where the wishlist came from a third-party app, Swym led with 95 installations in the sample, followed by Growave (75), Wishlist King (41), Wishlist Hero (29), Appikon (16) and Zooomy (15). 36.3% of working wishlists were built into the theme rather than bought as an app.
Is there a link between product tagging and wishlists?
Yes, and it is statistically strong. Splitting stores into quartiles by tags per product, confirmed wishlist presence rises from 17.9% in the least-tagged quartile to 40.5% in the most-tagged, a ratio of 2.26. A Cochran-Armitage test for trend gives z=5.43, p=5.6e-08.
Method, in short
Seeded random sample of 30,000 domains from the Tranco top 1M, probed at /products.json to identify Shopify storefronts. 1,075 found, 1,028 measured (95.6%). Three requests per store. Every store flagged as having a wishlist was re-fetched and classified, with the evidence snippet retained for each verdict. All proportions carry Wilson score intervals.
Known limits, stated plainly: the Tranco frame is global and traffic-weighted, so this describes trafficked Shopify stores rather than all of them; roughly one Shopify store in nine disables /products.json and is invisible to the frame; static HTML cannot see client-side rendering, which is why prevalence is a range; and “confirmed” means a control exists in the markup, not that we saved an item and watched it persist. The full limitations section ships with the dataset.
We run this measurement against individual catalogues too, as part of the Brand Audit.
See the Brand Audit